Imam Zaid Shakir on recent events in Tun…
Imam Zaid Shakir on recent events in Tunisia and Egypt
It is time for Americans to acknowledge that when we prioritize our interests in foreign lands over the interests of the citizens of those lands, in many instances, those citizens are starved, politically disenfranchised, tortured and sometimes killed. We have to realize that this is not only true in the Middle East, it is just as true in the Congo, Haiti and elsewhere.
Tunisians and now Egyptians have bravely stood up and challenged the hypocrisy, brutality and illegitimacy of their rulers. It is blatant hypocrisy for America to pontificate about the need for peaceful political reform in the Middle East and then support the violent repression of peaceful reformers or circumvent internal reform all together by imposing political change through the gun-barrel of an M1 Abrams tank. It is time that the people of this country stand up and challenge that hypocrisy. The masses in Tunisia and Egypt should be a source of courage and inspiration for us in this regard.
abunoor, 
salman, 
aziz 1:49 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
let’s be realistic here and not try to leverage the genuine struggle for freedom in the arab world for our own domestic political purposes. The arab street is in revolution because the arab regimes have failed them. They have distracted the masses with Israel as bogeyman, they have lied and silenced dissent, they have utterly failed to deliver the basic competence of rule. Egypt has a 40% – FORTY PERCENT – unemployment rate! Look at the images in Maydan al Tahrir and you will see youth, passion, idealism – the future, who have tired of waiting for the promises of the dinosaurs.
In the US, we have less than 10% unemployment. That’s high but not 40. We have free elections and the people just threw out one Congress and one party for another. This is the point of democracy – express your anger at your elites via ballots, not protests. It is the same outlet we hope the muslim brotherhood and other islamists will embrace throughout teh region. And embrace it they have, on their own, without invasions of western powers.
Zaid Shakir is seriously delusional if he thinks his highly specific pet issues about foreign policy even register on the average American’s radar screen. Tell a guy who has been on unemployment for teh max of 99 months and is losing that last safety line next month that we are unjust hypocrites abroad. He wont give a flaming crap, and rightly so!
foreign policy is the province of governments. People do not revolt in eth streets over such nebulous concerns. If the muslim american community wants some credibility in politics, we shoudl be focusing on issues close to home, that Americans can relate to. And we wonder why there was such fear and loathing about a community center in New York! sheesh.
abunoor 1:57 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
Aziz,
Zaid Shakir is a moral teacher, not a politician. He is trying to explain why people should care about the actions their government takes in their name overseas. Neither you nor I should hide behind either the unemployment nor apathy of ours as excuses for avoiding our own moral responsibilities.
aziz 2:08 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
of course. this is why i support pressuring for the foreign policy outcomes we desire, and i havent cut Obama slack on these issues – especially drones, where I have called for an outright ban akin to land mines.
But the expectation that people will rise up in teh streets akin to Egypt? Over foreign policy?
that is what I called delusional. Theres a hige disconnect between reality and such an expectation. People only revolt like this fo economic reasons. Thats the bottom line.
Of course we have moral responsibilities. I havent abdicated these. I’m willing to blog, and argue, and persuade people (especially people I disagree with – in conservative political circles) about what is wrong with our foreign policy. I have done so for years. But I’m not going to march on Washington. Thats the completely wrong approach.
abunoor 7:45 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
I don’t read Shakir as advocating rising up in the streets. He is saying that we should challenge the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy and stand with the people of Egypt and other victims of U.S. foreign policy.
aziz 8:53 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
well, okay. I guess I’m on board then.
I guess I just dont see what the courage of Tunisians and Egyptians has to do with our holding our own govenment to account for foreign policy hypocrisy. They are standing up for their own civil liberties; we are well past that.
Dean Esmay 2:26 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
I agree with some of this but to have this dialog we have to agree on first assumptions, and I’m not sure I do with Shakir here; if you don’t start with an understanding that 30 years of American foreign policy has not been a singular policy with one goal, but rather a complex set of decisions by multiple people over multiple administrations for a multitude of reasons as reality shifts on the ground, you have nothing to discuss; 30 years ago we still had a Soviet Union engaged in genuine imperialism, we still had hot war between Israel and her Arab neighbors, and a host of other things we no longer have. If you just assume “30 years of American foreign policy” as if it’s a monolith, and that American intervention is automatically inferior to Arab intervention, then you’re just being racist and anti-American, just like the accusations that we are “imperialist” are both racist and anti-American. Not to mention just plain silly.
With great power comes great responsibility; when you take that responsibility, you make judgment calls some of which are wrong, but some of which may be right but horribly unpleasant. We had reasons for backing Mubarak, and reasons which were not entirely selfish by any stretch and actually were quite arguably in the interests of most people in the region and not just America. Many of which no longer apply.
Our best long-term strategic interest is in a democratic and free Arab world. It has been for some time. The Soviet threat is no longer an overriding factor, and we arguably made a horrible mistake in the wake of the fall of that Empire and saying “well, the rest of the world can go do whatever it wants now, not our problem anymore.” I’d say that was laziness on our part, and it created a host of issues. It’s probably all going to take a decade or more still to settle out, but I have little doubt what the end result will be: I think not just Egypt but most of the rest of the world is going to be a lot better off. And that, too, will require American (and other) intervention, to help make it happen.
salman 11:12 pm on February 1, 2011 Permalink
Why didn’t Mr. Shakir say any of this during the deen intensives that he held and taught at in U.S. backed dictatorships such as Morocco and Syria ?
abunoor 9:36 am on February 2, 2011 Permalink
I’ve never been overseas with Imam Zaid, but his political views are well known to anyone who’s ever spent time around him here in the U.S. He has not hid them at all, and he has spoken much more often than almost any other prominent Muslim teacher about political affairs, and on a more sophisticated level. He has a Masters in Political Science and has taught political science at the university level here in the U.S.